Gulf Oil Spill: CBS 60 Minutes spoils BP and US govt efforts to "manage expectations" ... by gimleteye

There was a remarkable story and interview on 60 Minutes last night by Scott Pelley and one of the key engineers on the Deepwater Horizon when the rig exploded, putting the Gulf of Mexico and the economies and environment of the Gulf region at risk of severe damage. Click the link to watch it. Click 'read more', too:

Bleeding from a gash in his forehead from being blown across a computer control room, Mike Williams jumped from the flaming rig into the Gulf of Mexico: 100 feet straight down. He burst to the surface coated in oil and diesel fuel and escaped to tell his story. Williams gets to the key points: that the drilling operation had been troubled with a series of problems, all resolved in favor of BP pushing past safety concerns to save money.

Isn't it strange how the impulse to save money, to make more-- a few decisions by a few executives-- can do so much harm? You could think about that while looking at this map, overlaying the surface area of the spill on Miami. Given that a massive volume of spilled oil is lurking in clouds under the sea surface, it is easy to picture the area of the entire southern Florida peninsula encompassed by the spill. Let's hope that cloud doesn't wrap itself around us.

For different reasons, both the US government and BP and its subcontractors, TransOcean and Halliburton, are downplaying the mistakes and devastating consequences in the Gulf. BP, for example, has only released a fifteen second video clip of the pipe outfall: the company should have been ordered by the Obama White House to keep a camera in a continuous "on" record and transmit mode so that the world can see in real time what is going on. Instead the company says it has much higher priorities; no time, for instance, to calculate the true volume of oil leaking from the deep well that independent scientists estimate is five to ten times the acknowledged amount.

The US government has its own reasons for muting the extent of the tragedy. No one likes bad news on this gigantic scale. Although the Obama administration can scarcely be blamed from the culture of regulatory indifference that infected the operations of the federal government; from banking, to insurance, minerals and natural resource exploitation-- and measurement and science-- Obama could have acted much more quickly on taking office to reverse this culture.

I spoke to a senior government environmental official shortly after the Obama inauguration. I wondered aloud how long it would take to root out the lobbyists and industry insiders who, under George W. Bush and Karl Rove, ran the nation's major environmental protection agencies. It was clear that changing the political appointees at the Cabinet and sub-cabinet level could happen relatively quickly, but my contact told me that it would be much, much more difficult to change out ideologues who had been put into jobs that held a civil service status. That is a story for the future: what so-called regulators had the opportunity to hold BP and its subcontractors accountable for safety and environmental and permitting mistakes, but didn't because of their past relationships with regulated industries. Who failed to do their jobs, and how and under what circumstances were they put in positions to lubricate this catastrophic chain of mistakes?

The horrendous 2008 disclosures of the Minerals Management Service, the "sex for oil scandal", has been well documented. There is a lot more to come. Mike Williams will no doubt be called to testify to Congress in the coming days and weeks. Thankfully, he survived. Thankfully, he has the common sense to know that the full details of his story must be told in the public commons. Suddenly the "Drill here, Drill now, Pay Less" crowd of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Fox News bloviators have tar stuck to the roofs of their mouths.